Zika Virus

Waiting for the Crisis: Zika and Political Inaction

By Andy Dyer / On August 16th, 2016

Earlier this month, media announced the first Zika-related death in the United States, meanwhile Congress recently adjourned for a seven-week recess without passing additional funding to fight the virus. Check out what Chasing the Red Queen author Andy Dyer had to say about this political inaction below.

Anti-Vaxxed?

By Emily Monosson / On April 18th, 2016

In light of the fuss over Robert Di Niro and the movie Vaxxed; if anyone needs reminding of the value of vaccines, take a look at this diagram of 20th Century Death. These are estimates as they say but even so the numbers are humbling. I won’t go into the story behind the movie and its writer, director and one-time (now unlicensed) doc, that has been covered plenty (instead here is an interesting NYT article about the developer of the measles vaccine, Dr. Maurice Hilleman.

Mosquitoes and Zika Virus: "We Don't Have to Live in Fear"

By Emily Monosson / On February 24th, 2016

Mosquitoes, along with their disease-causing hitchhikers like West Nile, Equine encephalitis, Dengue, and now Zika, are on the move, finding new habitats and naïve populations ripe for infection. Just as Lyme has made tick experts out of us all (no, that one is just a dog tick), we are on a first-name basis with mosquitoes like Aedes and Culex.

Using DDT to Control the Zika Virus: "A Pandora's Box of Problems"

By Andy Dyer / On February 22nd, 2016

The proposal to bring DDT out of the retired arsenal of chemical weaponry to control mosquito vectors carrying the Zika virus is a Pandora’s Box of problems. And these are not hypothetical problems. The mosquitoes and the virus are biological threats that have emerged because of disruptions to the broader environment, all of which are connected to human population growth and simplification of the ecosystems humans live in. While the Zika virus is a very real threat to human health, the answer to this threat is not DDT.